Celebrate Toilets #OneFlush at a Time

Quick Overview

Thanks for visiting 😊. The next time you use a toilet and flush the toilet and it’s a #OneFlush (removes all human waste in one flush), will you:

• Wash your hands,
• Snap a photo of the toilet,
• Post the photo on social media with the hashtag #OneFlush, and
• Encourage others to share + celebrate their #OneFlush fun?

If yes, then please go for it and help grow the response #OneFlush at a time to President Donald Trump’s recent request to relax flush and flow standards for toilets and other bathroom fixtures.

If you are unsure whether you will snap and post a #OneFlush toilet photo, read further. Also read further if you want to know what happended and why you should respond.

Throughout this post, click any #OneFlush hashtag to see a Twitter feed of #OneFlush posts – right now, most posts are by the author.

What Happened

On December 6, 2019, President Donald Trump announced during a business leader roundtable meeting (text) that water is dripping out of American faucets and showers and toilets require 10 or 15 flushes rather than one flush. Trump requested the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE) for new policy to raise flush and flow rates for toilets, faucets, and showers above the current 1.6 gallons per flush and 2.5 gallons per minute standards in the 1992 Federal Energy Policy Act. He also said many states have abundant rain to supply the new required water.

Most news media simply repeated Trump’s statements without analysis. I did not see any stories that rain is actually a very expensive water source or that raising bathroom fixture regulations will raise water costs for nearly every American. Nor that relaxing the regulations will require Americans to buy larger water heaters or be difficult to implement. Somehow missing was the fact that most Americans already have functioning bathroom fixtures. Trump did not say and I don’t recall anyone asking where are these 10- and 15-flush toilets and dripping fixtures? Anderson Cooper (CNN) and Jimmy Kimmel (ABC) handled the smelly business with lots of humor – but then I wondered, how to actually respond to avoid the policy change?

Nine Major Problems with Trump’s Bathroom Statements

1) Allowing fixtures to pass more water will over time increase the water that utilities across the U.S. must deliver to their customers. Even if there is a rain source, making rainwater potable still requires constructing new reservoirs, pipelines, treatment plants, and other infrastructure that will cost billions and billions and billions of dollars (I don’t have an exact number, the cost will be different for each public and private water utility in the U.S.). Utilities will pass all these costs directly onto to customers and citizens. These very large costs are the reason why utilities all across the U.S. have active water conservation programs that rely on the current 1992 Energy Policy Act flow and flush standards.

2) Dripping showers and faucets and toilets that require a large number of flushes sound old and malfunctioning. Simply replace them! It’s a lot faster and cheaper than waiting months or years for the Trump administration, USEPA, DOE, and U.S. Congress to pass new regulations.

3) At any home improvement store, there is a large selection of quality models, styles, and features for all bathroom fixtures. Some models flow at Energy Policy Act rates while efficiency models use less water. Models are independently tested and certified to work. In their December 11, 2019 post, the Maximum Performance (MaP) program lists 4,648 residential toilet tank models by 201 brands. 4,049 toilets carry the USEPA WaterSense label and are high-performance, water-efficient options. 2,037 of the original 4,049 toilets passed at least 800 grams of MaP’s test waste material (soybean paste) in one flush (the maximum rating is 1,000 grams)(Maximum Performance 2019). (Disclosure: for my last two toilet purchases, I used the MaP ratings to pick out two new 0.8 gallon per flush toilets that passed lots of soybean paste in a single flush. Many years later, the toilets still work great).

4) New fixtures are cheap. You can buy high quality shower heads for $15 (Disclosure: I just bought a new showerhead in early Fall to replace a dripping, broken one). A new toilet may set you back $150.

5) Flushing a toilet 10 and 15 times per event is very abnormal. For example, the Residential End Uses of Water 2016 study recorded water use every 10 seconds by 762 households in 13 U.S. and 1 Canadian city for ~2 weeks per house (DeOreo et al. 2016). They found Americans flush a toilet about 5 times per day (DeOreo et al. 2016).

6) If you don’t trust the ~5 flushes per person per day value, download and explore the really cool 240 MB database that includes all 124,600 individual toilet flushes (DeOreo et al. 2016)(first create login). See the event start time, duration, volume, and numerous linked data.

7) Today’s standard and efficient toilets use much less water than toilets from two decades ago (even considering that the more efficient toilets occasionally double flush) (Abdallah and Rosenberg 2014; USEPA 2005).

Decrease in flush volume as standard (“National”), efficient (“Post-Retrofit”) and high-efficiency (“HEH”) toilets are installed. Red crosses indicate outlier flush events and the horizontal dashed green line is the current 1.6 gallon per flush standard. Part (a) cropped from (Abdallah and Rosenberg 2014).

8) Increasing flow to faucets and showers will draw more water from the hot water heater (Abdallah and Rosenberg 2014). If users do not also expand their hot water tank size, they will more regularly run out of hot water. For homes whose hot water heater is gas-fired, heating more water also means more carbon dioxide emissions.

9) Climate and weather patterns vary across states, within states, and over time. How to differentiate desert states without water to supply inefficient bathroom fixtures from other states where it will still be very expensive to supply inefficient fixtures?

My Initial Responses

Donald’s Trump comments immediately caught my attention at a very personal level. I work as an associate professor of water resources management at Utah State University. Some of that work includes studying water use in bathrooms and outdoors, trying to figure out what may motivate people to conserve water, and how much water, energy, and money they might save if they conserve (see related work). I love this work and it made me very sad when I realized Donald Trump’s Presidential bathroom statements lampooned my profession and career work.

You have many states where they have so much water that it comes down — it’s called rain — (laughter) — that they don’t know — they don’t know what to do with it.

Yes, rain is abundant in some places at some times. But rain is always very expensive to collect, store, treat, convey, pressurize, and deliver as potable water. It’s much cheaper and faster to replace dripping and malfunctioning bathroom fixtures.

Used again with permission from CartoonChurch.com. Contact CartoonChurch.com to request permission to use in other applications.

I knew I needed to respond. But how? How to share the relevant facts, communicate broadly to everyone who uses toilets, stay positive and constructive, and offer a solution rather than complain?

I first drafted opinion-editorials with the titles “Hire a Plumber to Fix Trump’s Dribbling Toilets” and “Replace Old, Malfunctioning Bathroom Fixtures” to submit to news outlets that I thought ran shoddy stories. No dice. My colleagues and mentors Peter Mayer (@mayer_water, Principal, Water Demand Management, Boulder, CO) and Mary Ann Dickinson (@MADH20, President and CEO, Alliance for Water Efficiency, Chicago, IL), who I asked to fact check the drafts, helped me see there was still Trump’s (false) belief that new water efficient fixtures will fail when they are installed.

Which is interesting because in the same business leader roundtable meeting, Trump lauded the reduced environmental impacts (higher fuel efficiency) of new cars:

… many of the old gas guzzlers are — that are spewing out bad things are going to be coming off the road.  Cars that are 10 years old and older, people will be going to the new cars because the pricing is better.  And the net result of what happens environmentally is a very positive result …

So here, yes, wait, … I thank the President on this point. Reduced emissions — including reduced carbon dioxide emissions — is positive. But further note: the same phenomena of improved efficiency by replacement over time has also been underway for many years with bathroom fixtures.

Reduced toilet flush volumes from REUWS 1999 (Mayer et al. 1999) to REUWS 2016 (DeOreo et al. 2016). The height of each vertical bar expresses the fraction of total study toilet flush events that used the specified toilet flush volume.

So Mr. President, why promote car efficiency but not bathroom fixture efficiency?

And, where are the 10- and 15-flush toilets and dripping bathroom fixtures — so they can be replaced to reduce large water use you complained about?

As I continued to ponder how to respond, Mary Ann Dickinson released the Alliance for Water Efficiency’s response (December 12). The Alliance is a national stakeholder-based organization and most immediately they will track developments, keep readers informed, and form a coalition of manufacturers, utilities, environmental organizations, and code groups. They will also talk with key members of Congress, follow DOE and USEPA next steps, and research whether the President can rescind fixture regulations by executive action alone. Each action is urgently needed and I am grateful they responded quickly and are pursuing direct contact with key players.

And I still pondered, how can I myself respond? What can I do and what can others do to help even more people respond directly and quickly to Trump’s request to raise bathroom fixture standards?

And then this past Saturday, I flushed a toilet. It was a #OneFlush (removed all human waste in a single flush) as is my typical experience. Nearly all Americans likewise flush toilets multiple times each day.

Which brings us to… Are you ready to help capture and share and celebrate many of these toilet flushes as an easy way to shout out that we’d like to keep the current standards for bathroom fixtures?

Respond #OneFlush at a Time

The next time you use a toilet and flush the toilet and it’s a #OneFlush (removes all human waste in one flush):

1. Wash your hands (yes hygiene!)

2. Snap a photo of the toilet,

3. Post the photo on social media with the hashtag #OneFlush (or ask a friend to share your photo if you don’t have an account or don’t want to overload your own account with toilet photos :), and

4. Encourage others to share and celebrate their #OneFlush experiences.

A #OneFlush at a house party tonight (used with permission). Great food. Multiple thanks for writing the blog post. Several #Offline toilet chats. And a #OneFlush pledge to post on #Facebook. Will the #OneFlush materialize? Thanks for a fun evening 😊 pic.twitter.com/GNQsLKHq5R

— David E. Rosenberg (@WaterModeler) December 21, 2019

Yes, please have lots and lots of fun with #OneFlush!

• Celebrate that our toilets and bathroom fixtures work correctly,
• Promote resource efficiency, and
• Let the Trump administration, DOE, USEPA, and Congress know that we put our trust in them to use the best available data, information, and science to make decisions that affect us each and every day and toilet flush.

And if you are not ready to #OneFlush, you have company! Check out a new post 5 hesitations and 10 encouragements to #OneFlush.

As always, I welcome comments, feedback, and suggestions to improve. Use the comments sections below.

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David E. Rosenberg lives in Logan, Utah. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Utah Water Research Lab at Utah State University. He tweets about his water work at @WaterModeler. This is the first science-based activism piece he has written.

References

Abdallah, A., and Rosenberg, D. (2014). “Heterogeneous Residential Water and Energy Linkages and Implications for Conservation and Management.” Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management – ASCE, 140(3), 288-297. http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29WR.1943-5452.0000340, Preprint: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cee_facpub/1178/.

DeOreo, W. B., Mayer, P., Dziegielewski, B., and Kiefer, J. (2016). “Residential End Uses of Water, Version 2.” 4309b, Water Research Foundation. https://www.waterrf.org/research/projects/residential-end-uses-water-version-2.

Maximum Performance. (2019). “Your next toilet. Your best toilet.” https://www.map-testing.com/. [Accessed on: December 13, 2019].

Mayer, P., DeOreo, W., Opitz, E., Kiefer, J. C., Davis, W. Y., Dziegielewski, B., and Nelson, J. O. (1999). “Residential End Uses of Water.” American Water Works Association (AWWA) Research Foundation, Denver, CO. https://www.waterdm.com/sites/default/files/WRF%20(1999)%20Residential%20End%20Uses%20of%20Water.pdf.

U.S. Environemental Protection Agency (USEPA). (2005). “Combined Retrofit Report, Volume 1: Water and Energy Savings from High Efficiency Fixtures and Appliances in Single Family Homes.”, Washington, D.C. http://www.aquacraft.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/EPA-Combined-Retrofit-Report.pdf.

Updates

Dec 18, 2019 (12:33 pm). Shortened a paragraph in final section about need for hygiene to two-word parenthetical.

Dec 21, 2019. Expanded and renamed last section to Common Concerns and Ways to Respond.

Dec 23, 2019. Moved COmmon Concerns to a new blog post.